I wonder so many nights what happens when a tiny child dies. Their body is like plush and their eye-whites are blue-white and sparkling. Freshness like that can't dry out and shrivel. That's for crumbling old bones and skin like crumpled chip-paper. For old folk. And then there's the soul. Moist still with new-born dew. Lily-white like apple blossom floating down in the summer wind. Where does that go?
But while I wonder, my wife weeps. As I wait for time to heal, she wishes the wound to stay open. She needs to suffer now that our child has suffered and gone. Her pain is her replacement child.
She prays to the Lord God for answers and falls on her knees in despair at His silence. Then she has the answer.
"Michael," she says. "take me to Our Lady who forgives all sin."
I tell my wife she hasn't sinned at all. But she fell asleep when he took his nap. When she woke, he didn't. She missed his final breath, warm and milky and sweet.
I won't take her to the statue she has asked to see. It is just a grey, rough-hewn stone by the wayside, dappled with lichen. Sinners who repent there are said to see the Virgin cry. Real tears that run down her dignified granite face. Well, I won't see my wife lose face like that. I cannot have faith in such hysteria.
But then came the day in the charity shop. My wife took our daughter, the surviving twin, into the shop. She pushed her in there, lying in the front of the double pram we still use. My daughter in her baby-pink, all scented with rose-petal powder and kisses and, behind her in the second seat, a bundle of useless blue baby clothes.
The shop-lady offered pity, a squeeze of kindness to my wife's arm. And my wife broke down in the shop, hanging onto the handle of the pram with our daughter gurgling with baby-glee inside there alone.
So I said we'd go to the statue for forgiveness. It was the only way she could look people in the eye again, she said. She'd read the lady's sympathy as thinly veiled blame or suspicion. She'd seen question marks, black and dancing, in the lady's narrowed eyes.
The night before our pilgrimage, I go there in the night, as soon as the sky is its blackest, with my chisel. I see the Virgin with my torch. The beam picks out her dry eyes. I wait. They are still staring. We stare at each other. We are both unmoved. I reach out with the chisel and work until dawn.
Next morning the sky is bitter with cloud; iron-grey and heavy. The rain lashes as we set out. As we arrive, it clears and the sun flashes on the statue as my wife emerges from the car.
She doesn't see the tiny gouges I made beneath the eyes; little wells that hold the rainwater tight. Hold it like I hold our daughter. Like I once held our son.
"Michael, she's crying for me. She's forgiving me. Will you look here Michael, please!"
My wife is smiling for the first time since our baby died. A swallow arches through the sky and our child claps her hands and points. We all look up at the blue-black curves of the sharply forked wings soaring, free, up into the heavens where young souls are kept safe.
And my wife has the sun on her smiling smiling face and I know I have set her heavy aching heart free too. And she can, having forgiven herself, look the world once more in the eye.
Copyright © 2008 Rob Richardson. All Rights Reserved.